fragility

I interrupt this never announced blogging hiatus to talk about the Massive Attack show at the Super Bock Surf Fest 2008 at Sagres, Portugal, which was, in one word, awesome.

First of all, i think they risked a lot by playing 7 (that’s right, seven !) new songs at a festival, but i think the overall reaction was great. Personally, i loved the new songs. They have a darker tone than the songs from their latest album, 100th Window, and it reminded me a lot of songs from Mezzanine and Blue Lines, with Del Naja and Daddy G singing a lot. Apparently there have been some youtube videos of these songs around for a while but i didn’t know about this.

The other thing i loved about the show (and i’m not sure if they have done anything like this before) was the “localization” of the stuff they showed on their background video panel (which was not exactly a screen but a sort of panel composed by thousands of small lights which could siplay different colours). Apart from all the weird effects (water ripples, spinning globes, old LCD like stuff), they showed national news in portuguese from that same day (as in a gigantic news ticker) during Inertia Creeps (which had an awesome live performance), and lots of quotes from famous people translated to portuguese during one of the new songs. I don’t think i recall having heard about any band doing anything like this, but given the fact that the band members have always had a word to say in political matters (all that content that was shown had something to do with politics or human rights, except for some of the news items) and have always done impressive stuff with video and other kinds of media (their DOS like website during the 100th Window days was great), i’m not really surprised. This also means they have to redo the content for every show, which shows a great commitment to live shows.

Apart from Massive Attack, i also loved the Dub Pistols show, a band of which i had never heard anything before. The rest of the bands were not really my kind of stuff (reggae mostly, which is the main music type on that fest), and i was there to listen to Massive Attack anyway.

One of those other bands (Morgan Heritage) also did something great while playing their last song, asking everyone to put up their cameras or phones to record a video of the rest of the show and just upload it to the internet. I was behind the majority of the crowd and it was awesome to see thousands of lit up little screens in the darkness of the night. And since my phone battery was nearly dead i couldn’t join everyone else on the recording madness.

Regular blogging will return in a while, not that i have always been anything close to what most people call regular.